'Tis the holidays, and as we feel compelled to each year, OgreCave has
brought together a list (which have checked twice) of games we recommend
as Christmas goodies. This second 2007 list shows off our pricier
selections of over $20, the presents that will make any gamer drool. Read on, and
let OgreCave help you deck the halls with worthwhile games!

There's no denying that Ticket to Ride has become not just a
firm favorite with hobby gamers everywhere, but with the non-gamers
who try it as well. Yet with two or three players, the core game (and
its sequel, Ticket to Ride: Europe) often feels as if everyone
is playing by themselves. The latest expansion, Ticket to Ride:
Switzerland, addresses this with a new board and a set of
accompanying destination cards first seen in the Ticket to Ride
computer game, specifically designed for just two or three players. Of
course, the players will need the train pieces and cards from the core
game, but this just means that this expansion is cheaper and comes in
slimmer packaging. The gameplay is much, much tighter, with
fewer trains each and the competition to claim routes all the fiercer,
many routes formed by expensive tunnels, and players now
able to fulfil destination cards that take their routes across the
borders to the nations surrounding Switzerland. This is a great
addition to the Ticket to Ride family and fans will enjoy
coming back to the game with fewer players.

The year's major licensed RPG, Battlestar Galactica shows that Margaret Weiss Productions has learned from producing the Serenity RPG and taken things a step further. This is the complete RPG for roleplaying in a perilous time for
mankind, their home worlds of the Twelve Colonies devastated by nuclear
strikes launched by their own mechanical creations, the Cylons. Now they
have returned to destroy mankind and that includes the survivors fleeing
in a ragtag fleet built around the Galactica, searching for fabled Earth
and driven by religious and political tensions. Covering the series'
first season only, the Battlestar Galactica RPG is part game, part
sourcebook, providing everything a BSG fan needs to survive with the
fleet or hit back at the frakkin' toasters.

Give several famous game designers a box of plastic trilithons (you
know, the Stonehenge archways), some druid figures and miscellaneous
colorful plastic bits along with a board and a matching deck of cards,
and what do you get? An anthology board game! (and an Ogre's
Choice '07 nominee, to boot!) Five very different games (ranging
from an abstract simulation of the electoral college to a ghostly
wargame, with bidding, bluffing and racing in between) using a common
set of components. You also get more than what's in the box - the
publisher is encouraging players to develop their own original games
using the parts, and quite a library is
developing online. If that's not enough, an expansion
(Nocturne) is available offering designs from more famous names
and additional components to allow up to seven players to participate.
If you can't decide on just one game this year, this can be the gift
that keeps on giving.

If you've been to any conventions in the past year, you've seen gamers
draw down on each other with foam pistols, without even signing up for a
LARP. This is Cash 'n Guns, where the goal is simple: be the
richest surviving gangster. Eight rounds of bluff-or-blam determines who
takes the cash and who needs a coroner in this fast-playing party game
for 4-6 gun-toting maniacs. Multiple game variants are included to boost
replayability, and a Yakuzas expansion is due in 2008. The Cave
Dwellers recommend a chaser of the Cheapass classic Spree to keep
the looting theme going, or perhaps a little RoboRally to
intensify the mood - and the alcoholic beverage of your chosing, of
course.

In the field of story games this year, it was the year of the ashcan -
"90%-there" games that sought out their customer bases early, to
benefit from their play and help support a culture of participation in
the design process. This early edition of Bliss Stage is not an
ashcan, exactly, but it does have rough edges and barely any artwork.
Nonetheless, it's marvelously explained and, in its way, the most
ambitious RPG of the year. Teenagers pilot dream-mecha through the
psychic landscape of their alien-attack-ravaged world, literally using
their relationships with others as their armor - with predictably
disastrous results when they take damage. This is an intense, and
intensely immersive, way to play with your friends. Still, though, if
the thought of making a gift of something that isn't quite final
doesn't sit well with you, you have lots of options in this space,
including the quite polished Grey Ranks for more teens-at-war action
(this time in occupied Poland), the multi-GMed noir detective fest
Dirty Secrets, or the supercharged engine of the John le Carre-esque,
Spione. (The latter is on lulu.com; look for the others at IPR.)

Come on, you knew this was gonna be here. You also know, if you
remember the history of FFG's video-game adaptations, that it isn't
gonna feel like StarCraft the video game when it comes down to combat.
And if you're really paying attention, you know that it doesn't
matter: this game is this year's winning entry in the
huge-galactic-strategic-throwdown sweepstakes. It's got an awesome
sense of interplanetary scope and connectedness that was elusive when playing the "real" thing, and the resource-management and
capacity-building parts of the game feel exactly right. So combat is a
little abstract, so what? You still get to scatter Zerglings
everywhere and make people nervous. For serious boardgamers, this is
a serious gift and a great game on its own terms.

Sometimes you just want to throw a grenade around a corner at some
Nazi cultists. Or run around collecting items, let's say. Or even...
respawn. These urges are natural and acceptable. Support them
for someone on your list with Tannhauser, probably the most lavish and
comfortable means ever devised to do something that's fundamentally
sort of cheesy and dumb - just like that place in Vegas that does $80
hamburgers, only you'll be having a blast instead of feeling stupid
and ripped off. There's even some real elegance to be admired in
Tannhauser (we love the range system, simple and beautiful without
making things too abstract).

At last Call of Cthulhu receives the treatment of Africa it has long
lacked. A perfect companion to the Kenya chapter of Masks of
Nyarlathotep that also stands on its own, Secrets of Kenya explores all
aspects of the Crown Colony, from the places to be seen in Nairobi to
the uplands and grasslands of the interior where even the lion is the
least of the dangers to be found. Dig for the origins of humanity only
to be caught by something worse, discover the reach of the Cult of the
Bloody Tongue in its homeland, and travel up country to hunt the
mysterious leopard men. This supplement includes a wealth of detail to
go with its four scenarios detailing the mundane, the outré, and the
Mythos forces free to range the Dark Continent far from the White Man’s
gaze.

A blast for B-movie fans, this easy boardgame is partially cooperative, partially competitive and
quite a bit of strategy. The board is modular and allows you to set the game up
in a number of different ways. There are a lot of cool scenarios
included. The heroes are all the typical archeotypes found in horror
movies: the jock, the drifter, the nurse, the priest and so on. They are
pitted against the zombies, which one player controls. While this might seem
rather unbalanced, the player who gets the zombies also gets some rather
nasty surprises which evens things out. It even has it's own
soundtrack, a CD of original horror-related music. With an expansion on the way,
this game will continue to thrill zombie fans everywhere.

It's been described as the dice game that thinks it's a card game -
actually, it might have been us who described it that way - but it can't
be denied that the beautiful artwork of courtiers and royalty on the
cards are one of the major attractions of To Court The King. In
play, it's a matter of capturing cards with your die rolls, and using
their exception-based powers thereafter, leading to comparisons to
Magic and other CCGs. In the end, of all the games on our list,
this Ogre's Choice
Award winner may be the game with the most classic feel, for fans of
an old-timey family-game experience or people inexperienced with games
outside the Power Three (you know, Settlers, Carcassonne, and
Puerto Rico).

In this gorgeous hardback, Kenzer & Co serves up a spicy treatment - in
full retro style - of the Old West that never was. The rules are old
style and clunky, at their most basic a detailed game of gun fighting
banditos and lawman, but at their fullest, a full blown RPG with rules
for prospecting and cattle driving. At the game's heart is the
entertaining gun fighting system - which has rolling initiative and uses
a "shot clock" laid over a silhouette of the target to aim exactly where
you want to hit. Even inaccurate shots might still hit, though not where you intended! And all this takes place
in a West where an earlier War Between The States ended in a stalemate
and the future of the Shattered Frontier is yet to be decided. Sure to
please the roleplaying Wild West devotee, Aces & Eights: Shattered
Frontier is the first RPG to really pick up Boot Hill's spurs.

In this very simple book, 100 of the hobby's most notable designers,
authors, and publishers contribute an essay on what each thinks is one
of the hobby's best games drawn from the latter half of the 20th
century. Not just the most cleverly designed, not just the most notable,
but also the most fun. The contents cover boardgames, card games, CCGs,
miniature games, and RPGs discussed by the likes of Gary Gygax, R. A.
Salvatore, Tracy Hickman, Greg Costikyan, Bruno Faidutti, Monte Cook,
Marc W. Miller, Alan R. Moon, Sandy Petersen, Ian Livingstone, both
Steve Jacksons, and many more, discussing games such as Axis & Allies, Cosmic
Encounter, Ghostbusters, Fluxx, Marvel Super Heroes, and both Vampire:
The Eternal Struggle and Vampire: The Masquerade. This is an incredibly
readable tome, worth checking not just to see if your favorite game is
included, but also to discover something new and worthy to play.

Our dice cups runneth over this year (they seem to every year,
actually), so we couldn't resist giving one extra product the nod. An
ogre can never have enough games, after all...

Climb into your building-sized Mech and destroy all who oppose you, as
you help determine the fate of the 31st century. Honestly, who hasn't
heard of BattleTech by now? One of the first, and arguably the
best, mecha-combat games, Classic BattleTech dispenses with the
anime angst that some games blend in, going straight for the throat with
both barrels and a salvo of rockets. Catalyst Game Labs brought back the
boxed set approach, complete with plastic miniatures, full-color
quickstart and main rulebooks, a miniature painting guide (!), a pair of
full-color double-sided mapsheets, and all the standard goodies you'll
need for piloting your BattleMech into the gritty reality of war. The
world of 3067 needs MechWarriors like you. Get in there.

That's two 2007 gift lists down, two more to go. Make use of this list
with your gift certificates and holiday cash - go on, splurge a little!
- as none of the products here will leave you disappointed. However, be
sure to look through our other
2007 gift lists for a more extensive study of the games you should
be lusting after this season.